SEGOVIA, Spain (March 24, 2026) – Shield AI and Destinus announced today the successful completion of a rapid autonomy integration campaign on the Destinus Hornet platform. The flight tests, conducted in Segovia, Spain, validated the integration of Shield AI’s Hivemind autonomy software with the Hornet flight control architecture after a two-month integration effort. During the campaign, Hivemind autonomously adapted the platform’s flight paths in real time, dynamically updating routing...

I was stuck on an old release of the Hugo static site generator for a while because some of the updated syntax wasn’t trivial to replace. I pulled the trigger this morning and upgraded, and spent the time updating themes and code. Breaking changes between releases are par for the course with Hugo, which does mean I can’t generally recommend it for laypeople. Though to their credit it did manage to find half a dozen posts where I had mangled some frontmatter; in one case from a post from te...

Hello. I'm hosting a writing contest with my friends at Quarter Mile . Please send us something! Don't overthink it -- they're just aliens, and you're only human. Hello. I'm hosting a writing contest with my friends at Quarter Mile . Please send us something! Don't overthink it -- they're just aliens, and you're only human. Hello. I'm hosting a writing contest with my friends at Quarter Mile . Please send us something! Don't overthink it -- they're just aliens, and you're only ...

I love the storytelling work that the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York does. For example, the Frame of Mind podcast highlights short stories of people’s relationships with museums – around fifteen minutes long each. It is a great listen. Last year, I watched a video by The Met on their YouTube channel as part of their “Meet Me at the Met” series. The video was an interview with Orhan Pamuk , a Nobel Prize-winning author. The video has stuck with me ever since. When I think about...

Left: Model of the ‘Lanyue’ lunar lander stacked on top of its propulsion module; Right: Diagram of the propulsion system of the lander. Images: Shujianyang / SAST / CASC The Chinese-language research journal “Chinese Space Science and Technology” has published a special issue on the development of various elements of China’s crewed Moon missions with 14 ‘open access’ papers. This includes details of the ~26,000-kilogram crewed lunar landing system called ‘Lanyue’,...

Whenever I stay still, I feel the spiders weave their webs around me. Their tiny legs entangle me in silk, traverse my body as they seem to proudly inspect their work and into darkness sink. There're times I see the spiders' threads on others, They shimmer gently in the purple dusk, Or sway with zephyrs in the hair of lovers, stuck. To listen to the webs is to hear echoes of social butterflies ensnared within arachnid galleries of human ethos, whose pieces come and go ...

Today I posted a video titled The best laptop Apple ever made , and tl;dw 1 it's the 11" MacBook Air. I acknowledge in the video my pick is slightly subjective, and I also asked a number of other YouTubers which Mac laptop they consider the best (or at least most influential). If you don't want to watch the video, I'll summarize their choices here: Today I posted a video titled The best laptop Apple ever made , and tl;dw 1 it's the 11" MacBook Air. I acknowledge in the...

Modern processors have the ability to execute many instructions per cycle, on a single core. To be able to execute many instructions per cycle in practice, processors predict branches. I have made the point over the years that modern CPUs have an incredible ability to predict branches . It makes benchmarking difficult because if you test on small datasets, you can get surprising results that might not work on real data. My go-to benchmark is a function like so: while (howmany != 0) { ...

After considerable effort and time, I think it's time to talk about some challenges the IT community faces over AI adoption. This entire article represents my thoughts and opinions only. Most AI adoption frameworks are targeted at the C-suite, and if you're a consulting company you likely want to target decision makers, and not IT. If you're a tooling company or AI provider, you talk up the org chart selling your product. I'll go into depth here talking across the org to fellow practitioner...

We love generative testing in the world of query languages, because languages in general are in a lot of ways, too complex to test by hand. There's an exponential number of combinations of features that could be involved in any given query. Database query optimizers do a lot of work to detect when those features are used together in ways that permit better execution. This is great, and important, especially when queries are generated by the composition of various tools that might not be aware of...

Fifty-eight years after it first appeared, string theory remains the most popular candidate for the “theory of everything,” the unified mathematical framework for all matter and forces in the universe. This is much to the chagrin of its rather vocal critics. “String theory is not dead; it’s undead and now walks around like a zombie eating people’s brains,” the former physicist Sabine Hossenfelder… Source Fifty-eight years after it first appeared, string theory remains the most p...

We don’t want to test gRPC or an HTTP server itself, we simply want to test our method’s logic. The simple answer to this question is to de-couple gRPC’s work from the actual work. – John Doak, Testing gRPC methods That advice is right most of the time. If your handler is a thin shell over business logic that lives behind an interface, you can test the logic without gRPC at all. Inject a fake , call the method, check the result. But sometimes you do need to test the gRPC layer. ...

If I get an email offering me a $1000 for I DON"T KNOW SINCE  I ignore it and don't even bother looking for other signs it is a scam.  If I get an email offering me $100  I may look more carefully and often they are legit (most common is to give a per-publication review of a math book---sometimes just questions, but more often a written report).  Most offers I get are either $1000 or $100. Today I got one for $750 which inspired this post (I ignored the offer without checking).  Which nets ...

So it turns out I didn't like the mustard yellow and steel blue design that I created a couple weeks ago. It just didn't sit well with me, and if I look back over my design history the designs that have stuck over the years are invariably grey with a splash of colour. Problem was, I didn't really know how I was going to redesign the site. Then, one day, I was talking with Sven via email and I visited his blog (also running Pure Blog for the record 🎉), and I immediately knew that was...

Trees take quite a while to grow. If someone 50 years ago planted a row of oaks or a chestnut tree on your plot of land, you have something that no amount of money or effort can replicate. The only way is to wait. Tree-lined roads, old gardens, houses sheltered by decades of canopy: if you want to start fresh on an empty plot, you will not be able to get that. Because some things just take time. We know this intuitively. We pay premiums for Swiss watches, Hermès bags and old properties ...

Consensus Board Game Mar 19, 2026 I have an early adulthood trauma from struggling to understand consensus amidst a myriad of poor explanations. I am overcompensating for that by adding my own attempts to the fray. Today, I want to draw a series of pictures which could be helpful. You can see this post as a set of missing illustrations for Notes on Paxos , or, alternatively, you can view that post as a more formal narrative counter-part for the present one. The idea comes from my m...

You’ve got to think about big things while you’re doing small things, so that all the small things go in the right direction. — Alvin Toffler A rule (or boundary) turns a theoretical or philosophical stance into a clearly defined behavior: Do this , and your behaviors align with your belief. Congruence.  Do that , and you miss it. Conflict.  Internal conflict doesn't feel good. Break dumb rules . Break arbitrary small rules (or don’t). Break rules that exist only t...

TL;DR; I converted Python Bytes from Quart/Flask to the Rust-backed Robyn framework and benchmarked it with Locust . There was no meaningful speed or memory improvement - and Robyn actually used more memory. Framework maturity, ecosystem depth, and app server flexibility still matter more than raw benchmark numbers. Last week I played with the idea of replacing Quart (async Flask ) with Robyn for our bigger web apps. Robyn is built almost entirely in Rust, and in the benchmarks, ...

Over the weekend, I had some interesting discussions about the impacts AI on developer growth and skill atrophy. Much of that discussion was inspired by Mo Bitar's video on the subject. Within my small group, we couldn't come to a consensus on its impacts. We all had anecdotes with wildly different outcomes, so I decided to push a poll on a few communities I participate in to get a better sense of how engineers feel about AI's impact on their learning. By the time time I collected and processed ...

Starlette 1.0 is out ! This is a really big deal. I think Starlette may be the Python framework with the most usage compared to its relatively low brand recognition because Starlette is the foundation of FastAPI , which has attracted a huge amount of buzz that seems to have overshadowed Starlette itself. Kim Christie started working on Starlette in 2018 and it quickly became my favorite out of the new breed of Python ASGI frameworks. The only reason I didn't use it as the basis for my own Da...

Cargo ship Marine Angel navigating the Chicago River in 1953. Via History Calendar . Welcome to the reading list, a weekly roundup of news and links related to buildings, infrastructure, and industrial technology. This week: damage to the Ras Laffan LNG facility, housing bubble risks, North Korea’s naval production, Bezos’ $100 billion for manufacturing automation, and more. Roughly 2/3rds of the reading list is paywalled, so for full access become a paid subscriber. War in Iran Ras Laffa...

Following the 7-step approach and the 1-step approach , and also channelling the spirit of the longstanding tradition of learning how to draw owls on the internet : Think about a subject and then start typing Type the rest of the fucking post and then hit publish Thank you for keeping RSS alive. You're awesome. Email me :: Sign my guestbook :: Support for 1$/month :: See my generous supporters :: Subscribe to Peo...

Creating a Kahoot quiz takes about five minutes from login to finished game. You need a Kahoot account, a topic, and a few questions ready to go. The process is identical whether you're running a classroom review, a team training session, or a trivia game with friends. Here's how to do it, step by step. How to Create a Kahoot Quiz: The Full Process Head to create.kahoot.it and sign in. Supported login methods include Google, Microsoft, Apple, and Clever. Users under 13 in the US, or un...